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Machine Learning Seminar Fall 2018 — Mohit Bansal, UNC-Chapel Hill

The Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech presents a seminar by Mohit Bansal of UNC-Chapel Hill. The event will be held in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Rooms 1116-1118, from 12:15-1:15 p.m. and is open to the public.

Title

Multimodal, Personable, and Knowledgeable Language Generation

Abstract

In this talk, I will discuss my group's recent work on state-of-the-art natural language generation (NLG) and dialogue models that are multimodal, personality-based, and knowledge-rich. First, we will discuss dialogue models which generate responses that are not only history-relevant and fluent, but also multimodal, e.g., relevant to dynamic video-based context. Next, we will present personality-based conversational agents, e.g., models that generate stylistic responses with varying levels of politeness and rudeness. Finally, we will describe several directions in making NLG models more knowledgeable, e.g., via adversarial robustness to user errors, via filling reasoning gaps in multi-hop generative-QA with external commonsense knowledge, and via multi-task and reinforcement learning with novel auxiliary-skill tasks such as entailment and saliency generation.

Bio

Dr. Mohit Bansal is the Director of the UNC-NLP Lab (nlp.cs.unc.edu) and an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill. Prior to this, he was a research assistant professor (3-year endowed position) at TTI-Chicago. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013 (where he was advised by Dan Klein) and his BTech from IIT Kanpur in 2008. His research expertise is in statistical natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal, grounded, and embodied semantics (i.e., language with vision and speech, for robotics), human-like language generation and Q&A/dialogue, and interpretable and generalizable deep learning. He is a recipient of the 2018 ARO Young Investigator Award (YIP), 2017 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), 2017 ACL Outstanding Paper Award, 2014 ACL Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, 2018 COLING Area Chair Favorites Paper Award, and several faculty awards from Google (2016, 2014), Facebook (2018, 2017), IBM (2018, 2014), Adobe (2018), and Bloomberg (2016). Webpage: cs.unc.edu/~mbansal